cseleborg

Isn't this the entrepreneur-or-freelancer divide? Is the thing you're working on making you money while you sleep (entrepreneur, "startup" is appropriate) or do you only get paid when you work (freelancer, "self-employed" is appropriate).

Not saying this distinction is useful, but at least it's a common way of talking about the various forms of "being your own boss".

What a charming new career path! And you make an interesting point about signaling attention to detail giving a guarantee of sorts that the things that matter are covered as a matter of course.

Reminds me of a friend who would go straight to the restrooms for a quick visual inspection upon entering a restaurant: if those aren't clean, there's no reason to think the kitchen is.

Yes, I think so too. Just like there is a demand for handmade objects like vases, cooking knives and beverages, which was the norm before the industrial revolution and has now become a thing of intrinsic value, provides they are of higher quality than their factory-made counterparts (I have a background in the spirits industry, where "small batch" and "handmade" have often been used to justify premium prices despite clearly lower quality. I've become a little more discerning since when I see those labels anywhere and don't take quality for granted).

Your article matches my own intuition, and there's a case to be made for adjusting our architectural patterns to better compartmentalize those parts of the app we can let an agent go nuts on. For example, could we leave all of the UI to the agent? Or things like the MCP Server implementation of the app? I'm not quite sure where to draw the line yet. I'm quite comfortable leaving unit tests to the agent by now, but if it's user visible behavior, I still find the agent's work to be off somehow. Ymmv, I guess.

I guess we'll only be able to verify this 10-15 years after coding agents arrived. Personally, I think there will always be a market for apps created with care and great attention to detail.

> they are very strongly tuned to value code that has no errors which can be picked up by linters or similar, while humans work the opposite way

This is a really valuable insight! It resonates well with my own experience revewing AI-authored code: I look hard at interfaces, architecture and performance, and merely glance over code that just "gets the job done", because if it works, I'm not worried about it. Now I can express that dichotomy much more clearly -- thank you!

That is my experience as well. I get a (subjective) speedup between 1 and 3 for parts of the code I'd consider critical and where I check the output tightly, and 5-20 for menial work OR for important code that's well isolated into its own module such that its quality doesn't matter because I can have it rewritten easily if it doesn't work as expected.

A bit off-topic, but it is interesting that you say this.

Just earlier today I listened to Startups for the Rest of Us podcast episode 842 [1] titled "The future of SaaS in an AI World", where host Rob Walling addresses the "SaaS is dead" question. One of his arguments is that it's rarely worth spending time on rebuilding your SaaS vendors' solutions, taking time away from your core mission. But I guess that:

  1. the projects you hinted at are low-value services (e.g. CRUD web apps over DBs), and not SaaS services which have real moats, like CRM (connectors ecosystem) or email service providers (IP reputation, IT security).

  2. His argument applies to startups, where you're trying to grow your valuation by growing revenue (valuation = 5-10x yearly revenue) as opposed to established corporations which usually have a higher incentive to limit costs.

You seem like a very smart person, so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts here. Were these low-value SaaS services, and is this in the context of an established business?

Bento is awesome, well done!

[1] https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...

The copy has AI written all over it. I find it very difficult to take any of it seriously.

That's a genuinely grim thought, but not unrealistic either. I'll have to chew on that one, it's interesting.

I agree in sentiment, I love knowing that another human made this, either because I fancy I could maybe do something as good as that, or because I just admire the talent, or simply because the lyrics or music touch me somehow.

That said, there are a lot of people who simply enjoy having something playing in the background, it doesn't matter what, and if you're into country music it's great to have 10,000+ hours of country music to play.

If Tidal provides a checkbox so you can choose whether to exclude AI content, I think that would work for both audiences.

Maybe if enough AI produces self-report their work as AI, and enough non-AI producers are honest about uploading non-AI work, they'll quickly have the necessary amount of good-enough data to train good classifiers?

True, we conducted science, part of which involved gathering and analysing data, to refine those "simple rules", though I'd say they've been pretty stable for a long time.

Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.

> You want as much data as you can get about your health

The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided.

1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc.

2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.

It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside.

Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.

Anthropic, as much as I think they are the soundest of the AI labs out there, still has a massive incentive to push things out that aren't saftey-vetted to the level we expect. They are very willing to "move fast and leave holes", to paraphrase M.Z. Hell, they leaked their own source code!

Out of curiosity, I just compared my home wifi between fast.com and cloudflare's speed tedt and got similar results, completely and definitely disproving (n=1) my claim above.

I read a while ago that certain ISPs will optimize the traffic to Netflix's servers, and so when you run fast.com (which is my default, by the way), you get your Internet speed for watching Netflix, but not necessarily for other things.

No, thank you. LLMs are great for fuzzy things. But there are still a lot of things I do on my computer that are just a few mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts away, achievable in less than 3 seconds. It'd be a disaster if that got removed.

Isn't "why" what commit message bodies are for?

If you create a chatbot, you don't want screenshots of it on X helping you to commit suicide or giving itself weird nicknames based on dubious historic figures. I think that's probably the use-case for this kind of research.

> The easiest way to get MyGNUHealth is by installing the package from your favorite operating system / distribution. Many operating system distributions already ship MyGNUHealth.

I was actually curious to try this out on my phone, since they claim to support mobile devices.

If running a command-line package manager is the easiest way to install this on Android, I don't want to know what harder ways exist.

I find this is quite typical for open source projects. The community still hasn't really, truly adopted mobile. I guess it's because of the need to have some sort of entity be present in the various App Stores? But if it's possible for servers, why is this so rare to have open source projects as app store vendors?

There is something to be said for trust here. I like that I can go straight to the imprint ("Impressum") to know with whom I'm dealing with online, where the company is located and who the CEO is. This is not always easy to decipher from the "Terms" pages companies in the US and elsewhere provide.

The downside for founders is that you have to divulge your address, unless you take additional steps to give yourself a mailbox address, but this can also be illegal if you're not careful. You can also rent an office of course, but for indie devs and freelancers, this is usually not financially viable.

That's a bit exaggerated. I did have a company, and while it did come with bureaucracy, the vast majority of my time was spent on what you expect a founder to do (sales, marketing, product, etc.).

This piqued my interest. Can you elaborate?

There's an excellent podcast called Acquired with a 3-part episode covering the birth and evolution of NVIDIA, highly recommended.

Slackware!!! Dang, I had forgotten that name. That was the first distro I installed as well. Xeyes and stuff. Oh, dear...

This very technique is why I loved Salman Khan's teaching videos on Khan Academy so much. On any topic, he goes straight to the content, no intro whatsoever.

That's a great answer, very helpful. I just picked up Avalonia for a test drive. Why do you think Uno is better than Avalonia for mobile?

The strain of bacteria was described as "notoriously drug-resistant". It didn't sound to me like the bacteria became drug-resistant in space.